• SpaceX just launched 50 more Starlink satellites into orbit in a single day, using a pair of its trusty Falcon 9 boosters from facilities at Cape Canaveral and Vandenburg.  (Space)
  
  And recovered both boosters, with them landing autonomously on the company's two purpose-built drone ships.
  
  I was curious as to how long it took mankind to launch its first 50 satellites into orbit, and the answer surprised me: Withing four years of Sputnik there were over a hundred satellite launches.  "Space race" is no misnomer.

• Speaking of SpaceX they just signed a deal for Google to pay them $920 million per month for compute capacity in SpaceX's Colossus datacenters.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which might sounds backwards but illustrates the scale on which the company is operating.  SpaceX already has an arrangement with AI company Anthropic, which pays SpaceX $1.25 billion per month to lease compute capacity.
  
  
  
• SK Hynix is planning to double memory production at its factories in Korea and China.  (WCCFTech)
  
  By 2030.  The drought won't break anytime soon.
  
  
  
• A coalition of trade associations representing the telecommunications, automotive, and medical device industries has urged the Trump administration to do something about that drought.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though it's not clear what they can do.  Even direct government investment or loan guarantees for Micron - the one American player among the Big Three memory makers - to accelerate expansion can only go so far because it takes years to build and fit out new factories, and the availability of the equipment for making chips is as constrained as the chips themselves. 
  
  
  
• The Radxa Dragon Q5E is a small single board computer for embedded projects with a Qualcomm Dragonwing Q-6690 processor.  (Liliputing)
  
  (muffled screaming)
  
  Qualcomm is infamous for masking the specs of their processors.  For more than a decade every CPU shipped has contained "Kryo" cores according to the company's own datasheets.  Those are relabeled Arm cores, but you're not supposed to know which relabeled Arm cores.  Could be the A53 from 2012; could be the latest X925.  It's all just "Kryo".
  
  It's as if General Motors announced its 2026 Car (TM) with Engine (TM) technology.
  
  Anyway, in this case it has four A720 cores and four A520 cores on a 4nm process, because as soon as one person outside Qualcomm gets their hands on one the real specs leak out.
  
  
  
• Intel is planning to refresh its new entry-level Wildcat Lake processors next year - pushing them solidly into the mid range.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The cheapest model, the 304, has one performance core, four low-power cores, and one graphics core; the other current models have two, four, and two respectively.
  
  The planned upgrade will bring the count of performance cores to four, a perfectly reasonable number for an everyday laptop.
  
  
  
• Nvidia's on-again off-again 50 Super range of GPUs might be on again?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Expected at the end of last year, these models would have swapped 2GB GDDR7 memory chips for 3GB models, with some unspecified other minor improvements.  The 5070 with its 12GB of RAM - limiting for some recent games - would be supplanted by a 5070 Super with 18GB of RAM.
  
  Rumours now include a 12GB 5060 Super, plus the new 24GB 5070 Ti Super and 5080 Super.
  
  No leaks of when or how much, but not soon and not cheap.
  
  
  
• Brave Origin is a new browser from Brave that costs $60 to remove features from Brave.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  But the features it removes are Brave's own - relatively unobtrusive - monetisation efforts.
  
  (Speaking of which, Tom's Hardware has annoying new ads that fill every inch of whitespace on the page.  If you set Brave's adblock to "aggressive" it makes them go away and leaves the page readable again.  I don't want website owners to starve but there are limits.)
  
  The $60 is a one-time payment and lets you install the browser on up to 10 systems, so I'd only need two licenses.
  
  And it's free on Linux, so I might only need one.
  
  
  
• Asus has a new 13" monitor on offer with a resolution of 3200x2400 - sort of - and a 35Hz nominal refresh rate.  (Liliputing)
  
  It covers around 30% of the DCI-P3 colourspace.
  
  Yes, it's an e-ink display, so take that refresh rate with a pound of salt, and the resolution as well: In colour it is cut by half, so 1600x1200.  Which is not terrible for a 13" display you would use mostly for reading text, but worth remembering.
  
  I did some digging on the original 2012 Nexus 7 tablet - which I owned (and probably still have in a box in the garage), and which had notably murky colour thanks to the choice of a budget LCD panel.  That still offered something on the order of 60% of DCI-P3 colour.
  
  
  
• Been very busy at work recently, pushing a new project towards release.  Got sign-off from both the QA and marketing teams yesterday, so I finally get a weekend off.  Ish.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude